40 Years Later, Jodi Mitchell Reflects on Her Time on the Streets

Jodi Mitchell’s thought-provoking and eloquent post on Nacio Jan Brown’s “Rag Theater” website offers an account of the darker side of street life, including the sexual exploitation, harrowing drug culture, fear, and loneliness that played key roles in the life of the street. Jodi addresses the dangers of crash pads, where “a young girl trying to sleep in a crash pad always had to preform survival sex” (typo in post).

She also provides a comparison of her life on the streets to the young women attending UC Berkeley, as she “washed with dispenser soap and dried off as best I could with rough brown paper towels; all-the-while beautiful, young clean, college girls would be touching-up their mascara and chattering with their friends by the bathroom mirrors.” Jodi’s time on the street offered a vastly different life from the kind of womanhood experienced by the young women at Berkeley, many of whom were fighting for their own definitions of liberation for women.